The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the world’s largest conservation organisation, has asked Exponential‐e to help it bolster its connectivity. The move is part of the organisation’s wider strategy to move to a cloud‐based IT estate, improving its ways of working by becoming more agile, robust and capable of rapidly implementing new technologies.

WWF UK relies heavily on bandwidth‐intensive technologies, such as real‐time video conferencing and other variations of unified communications. Employees don’t use traditional telephony in their offices at all. The network was unable to support these requirements at the organisation’s headquarters in Woking and its two satellite offices in Cardiff and Edinburgh. The lack of internet bandwidth had reached a point where employees were simply not using connectivity‐enabled tools and inter‐office connectivity was becoming severely restricted.

Aside from staff productivity, the organisation was unable to implement an effective IT disaster recovery strategy, because the network was not robust enough to move data offsite. This introduced a significant element of risk to the business and in the event of a disaster it was unclear how much data could be recovered and in what timeframe.

Paul Beyer, Infrastructure Architect, WWF UK commented: “We underestimated just how embedded internet‐based services and tools had become in our operations and as a result, the network simply wasn’t able to keep pace with what the business needed. Every time we upped the capacity, it was consumed. The key issue was that we couldn’t tolerate bursts in usage and mitigate them. As a result, colleagues were frustrated, productivity was faltering and interoffice connectivity was constantly critiqued.”

“We implemented a network from Exponential‐e that had high capacity bearers and QoS technology so that we could better understand usage and implement a highly functional, reliant network, to support data flows across the business. The difference was instant. Our network is now managed proactively and issues are resolved before they impact operations. In a cloud environment the importance of this can’t be overstated. From a business risk perspective, we can now execute a sophisticated disaster recovery plan that would see the company up and running rapidly with full data access,” Beyer concluded.

Exponential‐e was awarded the contract based on its expertise, personable account managers and the clarity of their plans to address the issues faced. The improvements achieved were twofold for the WWF UK. Firstly, business applications such as the cloud and SaaS implementations began to deliver true value. Secondly, the IT team were able to focus on improving the organisation’s technology and move forward with projects without constantly having to firefight issues arising from poor connectivity.

Andrew Chant, Head of Networks at Exponential‐e commented: “WWF is an incredibly important organisation and one that we are very proud to work with. They work across the globe so it is imperative that they have the connectivity to enable them to do so effectively. By implementing the technology needed to enable the digital journey they want to go on, we have given the WWF UK peace of mind in its day‐to‐day internet use and plans for the future.”